Thursday, April 5, 2018

In
Canada, the fertility industry currently presents egg donors with a veritable
“eggdonorama” of experiences to “choose” from. With legalities around donation
murky at best and the wide variance of standards of care from fertility clinic
to clinic, it really can be a crapshoot whether or not an egg donor gets
treated as a person, not a product.

Claire
Burns is a nationally renowned egg donor advocate. Her current work focuses on
initiatives that prioritize the short and long term health of egg donors.
Claire’s play Hatched (2012),
inspired by her experience as an egg donor,led to the co-founding of We Are
Egg Donors (WAED) in 2013.

WAED
provides an honest platform for egg donors around the world to connect, proving
that there is no "one size fits all" story for all of us. Because
there are zero long-term studies on the health effects of egg donation, we
partner with researchers and nonprofits like Our Bodies, Ourselves to advocate for initiatives that value donor
health. We Are Egg Donors has been
featured in The Atlantic, the New York
Times, Globe and Mail, VICE and
Chatelaine.

Burns
has been an invited speaker at the Canadian Institute of Health Research Donor
Conception Conference (2013), Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society’s Annual
Meeting (2015), Workshop on Proposed AHR Regulations (Ottawa 2016) and Health
Canada’s Best Brains Exchange: Path
Forward for the Assisted Human Reproduction Act (2018).

With
the current absence of oversight and data collection within the fertility
industry, standard of care within clinics can vary wildly and the long term
effects of donation are still unknown. It’s time for Canadians to wake up to
the fact that without data and research egg donation is human experimentation
with no possibility of informed consent.

Eggdonorama: A performance lecture
about egg donation in Canada

April
15, 12pm Feminist Fuck It Festival, 360 Geary Avenue

Tickets available at www.eggdonorama.brownpapertickets.com

For
more information, to schedule an interview, or to receive a press pass to this
event please contact